Marketing on the internet and particularly Affiliate Marketing, is a relatively simple process. So why then do over 95% of people who "give it a go", FAIL.

One of the major reasons is that they fail to plan to succeed. And you can not plan to succeed if you are not aproaching your opportunity with a business attitude.

So the first thing I believe you must do no matter how many hours, or how much money you are going to put into this opportunity, you must treat it as a business.

Many people who decide to "give it a go", plan on starting out by spending 5 to 10 hours a week and with little or no cash to inject into the business. T

There is nothing wrong with that, well except if you plan to put absolutely no money in. It does not have to be a lot but it is not realistic to expect to grow a meaningful business without some capital.

In any case if you do not have much time or money, that is fine, but you still need to have a business attitude.

Things like setting goals and expectations, budgeting, time management, advertising, research and development, and training are all key components of successful businesses, and you need to address those aspects in some way.

The first part of your "plan To Succeed" should set out what you expect to get out of your business. Those expectations should be matched up to be relevant to both the amount of time and money you expect to put into your business.

No you are not going to earn a million dollars this year if you plan on devoting 5 to 10 hours a week with a start out budget of $50-00.

I am not saying you can not achieve that financial goal, it is just not going to happen in 12 months - the output does not "match" the input. However you could expect that you may achieve that in 2 to 3 years.

Once you have spent a few minutes, and I mean no more than 15 minutes, you can start to set some goals. OK I know this is a big topic and can be a bit daunting. You don't have to go through the full life process and work out how this is going to change your life etc.

But you do need to have a good idea of at least where you want to be in 1, 3, 6 and 12 months. My tip is start with your 12 month expectation, and work back from there. Once again don't dwell on this, 15 or 20 minutes is enough time to work it out. Also don't let the internet marketing "hype" influence you.

Now the most important part of your goal setting is to determine what you need to learn, how you are going to apply it, and when you are going to put it into action.

You need to spend a couple of hours researching this. I recomend that in this process you ignore any "sales pages". Do your research in forums or other online comunities where there are people giving their advice and knowledge freely.

While you need to go through this phase, and it needs to be well researched, try not to get caught up in an ongoing research mode.

I recomend at this stage you DON'T start with any website of your own, there is a whole other learning curve in getting one set up and established.

Read up on the process of Search engine optimisation (SEO) and also Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and also check out Clickbank. You can look at many other sites like clickbank, but they are the best to get started with. Once your business is functioning you can play around with others. For now, you WILL find a product to promote with clickbank (please note I am not making any money from this recomendation - just trying to save you time).

In brief, heres what you need to do to get started;

• Find a market - easy you probably already have one in mind
• Research a market - you need to study keyword research
• Determine what that marketing is looking for - research forums and social websites to see what people are saying
• decide upon a product - Clickbank
• Advertise - choose either SEO or PPC - this is not quick, do your homework.
• Commence making money!!

Just to reinforce this process, it is an overview of what you need to learn that you are looking for so that you can allocate a logical set of steps that you will take in going through the actual learning phase. Do not dwell.

You probably already have a good idea of how it works, but this is a box you must tick off, if you don't get this, you WILL fail.

The actual market place is in many ways no different that in the traditional market place. Many of the items being sold are much the same with the addition of "digital" products that can be delivered immediatly vis the internet. In most cased these are just conventional products that have been converted, like books, cd's and dvd's.

Like in a conventional business, it matters not how good your prices and or products are, if you can not be seen or accessed, your business will fail. A traditional business must choose a visible and accessible location if it wants customers to walk through it doors, OR must spend a lot of money telling people where they can go to find them.

The internet is like the second option. The number of places you can advertise to get customers to come is many and varied. However the major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo are without doubt the places to be to get seen.

The future may be a different picture with the growing popularity of Social websites like Myspace and facebook. But we are talking about now so I am going to discuss Google as the main example.

Essentially what you need to do is to make sure your offer gets on the first page of results that they display when a potential customer types in their "keywords" or phrases in a google search.

You can acheive this with a lot of time and effort via Search Engine Optimisation, you don't have to have a website but you will need to have a blog. There will be a much longer time lag in getting a return on your investment, but the process will reap good long term benefits.

Alternatively you can use pay per click advertising. the results can be instantaneous. There is a learning process, do not think that you can just put up an add and start making money. It will probably take about 4 or 5 hours of reading and a couple of hours of familiarising your self with the actual process of placing your advertisments.

You will need to decide which method best suits the time and budget you have available. My recomendation is to choose the Pay Per Click option purely because you can be getting results far sooner.

I hope by now you have got the message, research is fundamental to your success. To put it a different way most businesses succeed because what they do has been systemised and there are certain processes that they go through in the delivery of their products and services.

Your business is no different, and unless you already know all that there is to know about internet marketing, there are 2 forms of research that will be ongoing in your business;

1. Research about the markets and products that you intend to be involved with
2. Your own understanding of the many different ways you can bring your products and or services to that market place.

Both processes will always be a partof your business if you are to succeed. So if you can not see yourself paying attention to theseprocesses, you need to do one of 2 things, outsource them or sorry but go and do something else, save your time and money.

OK OK, enough of the research thing!

Now I can finally put my fun hat on and say go for it. And you really have to recognise when enough is enough and put the accelorator down, perhaps not to the floor, but you do need to start moving, otherwise, well you just can't make money if you never take your product to the market.

not Taking action is one of the other main reasons why people fail with their businesses. They just never actually get going. Even most of the successful internet marketers will admit to a period of doubt or paralysis by analysis.

This is why I recomend right at the start that you get your mind set right. If you are treating your business as a BUSINESS, then you know that a business is meant to sell stuff and make money. If you think of it as a hobby, then most hobbies don't make money. Making money is not the main reason you have a hobby, is it.

And secondly if you do not have any goals set with some sort of realistic expectations and time frames, then you are far more likely to get caught up in the research stage.

I will say it one more time, Research is absolutly critical, but it is completly useless if you never put your learnings in to action.

So recognise when it is time to start at the start and then work towards that goal.

Good luck and go for it!